


From Dark Waters

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Maeglin survives AU, Painful conversations on the beach ft. Maglor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 15:38:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4925290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maeglin doesn't know why he survived the fall. He should have died, but when the flood comes to drown Beleriand, he is saved once again by a mysterious stranger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Dark Waters

There was only light and darkness and pain, before the flood came.

For a long time - days, years, centuries, he didn’t know - he lay there, at the base of the cliff, watching the smoke curl in the dirty sky like oil, days flashing past. The sun and the moon hurt his eyes as Maeglin lay there, wreathed in pain, waiting. Waiting to die.

But his body, it seemed, was not quite ready to die yet.

The rocks had broken his back, his legs, his arms. He could taste blood in his mouth, congealing into a crust on his lips. He supposed he had broken several ribs in the fall; he could barely bring himself to care, now.

He wondered - with abstract detachment - how long it would take him to die. The rest of the time, he thought of water.

As his mouth grew dryer, its sound ran clearer and clearer through his dreams. Sometimes he could almost imagine he heard Ulmo whispering his accusations in the babble of a stream that wasn’t there. He deserved every single one, he thought. He knew he should have died by now.

Yet thirst, Maeglin began to think too, would be a terrible thing to die of.

After a while, he began to be able to raise his head. Then he saw - and he was almost certain he wasn’t dreaming - that the water had  _not_  been his imagination, or Ulmo’s revenge, or some vision of Morgoth’s doing. It was a real stream; he even remembered it from his life before, that tiny trickle of a spring running from a cleft at the base of Amon Gwareth, out into the valley that had once been to green and bright.

It wasn’t any longer; Tumladen was ash and dust now. Thanks to him.

Yet the stream was still there. When he had the strength, Maeglin levered himself effortfully up onto his hands and knees, wincing at the stabs of pain that lanced through his whole body - yet he fully deserved every one and more, he knew - plunged his face and hands to the water and drank greedily, gasping at the shock of the icy water on his skin.

The water tasted of smoke and ash and death, yet it cleansed the clotted blood from his face and eased the thirst that was closing his throat, dry as dust.

When he had drunk enough to make his stomach ache, wretched up some of the water, and drunk again, he drew back, letting his hands simply trail in the stream. He could see his reflection, a little, in the stiller edge of the pool where the water collected at the bottom of the cliff.

His face was not as he remembered it.

Below the blood, his skin was ridged and pitted with jagged scars, the marks of Angband. The glamour that had hidden them when he had returned to Gondolin had gone. He supposed he had not been able to maintain it while he had been unconscious, though he had not even been aware that he  _had_  been maintaining it himself. Perhaps it had simply run its course, served its purpose.

It had certainly done that, serving Morgoth’s purpose. As he had himself, now left a useless broken thing.

He was alive though.

He tore what remained of his black cloak and outer clothes into pieces, bandaging his broken bones as best he could, more because he was at a loss for what else to do than out of any desire to heal, or to stop the pain.

The pain kept him there; it reminded him who he was now.

Yet day by day it receded, just a little, as his body healed. Hunger clawed at his stomach, but he knew the Eldar could not die of hunger, even as he now realised, his mind a little more lucid than it had been, that even if he had not found the stream, he would still not have died of thirst.

Each day it hurt a little less when he applied pressure to the places where his bones were broken, and each day he could move a little more.

One day, he even tried to walk. He fell, almost immediately, in a painful heap upon the rocks.

The next day he did it again, and fell again, and the next.

The day after that he did not fall. Instead he walked a little way, before collapsing with exhaustion and pain, yet filled with something strangely like pride.  

Time went by. A new star rose, that Maeglin found he could not look at. Great fires burned on the northern horizon, lighting the whole sky with lightning and sound and cataclysm. He did not know what was going on, but he did not especially care. That world was not for him now.

Then came the flood.

The ground was sinking, subsiding, great cracks opening in the war-scourged land. Water came, a raging torrent, swirling and sucking whirlpools. The black waters hit him like a solid wall of obsidian glass, and he opened his arms to it, letting the cold envelop him, body spasming at the shock of the cold, before all went dark.

Maeglin was not expecting to awake again.

Yet he  _had_ , he realised, as he opened his eyes the merest crack - his eyes burned, they felt crusted with something; could that be  _sand_? He blinked them furiously to try to clear his vision, but they only filled with stinging tears - and he was in another place, somewhere new.

Furthermore, there was someone standing over him.

“What have I found?” said a voice above his head, the figure leaning down. Maeglin could only see long tendrils of trailing dark hair, half-lifted by the soft, salty breeze, and the impression of a face through his blurred eyes. But he got the feeling that whoever it was wasn’t speaking to him, but to themself. He heard the stranger take a breath, sharp and indrawn, and flinch back slightly from him.

Maeglin tried to reply, but he found he had no voice. He could taste salt on his lips when he opened his mouth, his nose and throat burning with it too.

“Come on” said the voice, recovering quickly “this is not a place to be lying on the ground.” And as soon as he was aware of what was going on, he was being lifted in strong arms, cradled like a child, water cascading from his hair and clothes.

The fire was crackling almost cheerily by the time he finally cleared his vision enough to see the one who had brought him here and laid him on the ground beside it.

They were in a sort of sheltered inlet between two cliffs, he saw, and he could hear the constant shushing of the sea behind him.

The sea! He had never seen it, not truly. His mother - and later his uncle - had told him of the sea, of course. But those stories had been full of longing, of bitter loss and shining memory of happiness. He found he could not connect them to the mass of water at his back that had nearly stolen his life, the stranger sitting before him, prodding at the fire with a piece of sodden wood.

“What…” he began to choke out, before changing his mind. “I… who?”

The stranger looked up at him, his eye sockets thrown into heavy shadow by the fire below. Somehow, he reminded Maeglin of someone else, but his mind struggled to dredge up the memory, as though his thoughts were still clawing for breath in the sea, though his body was safe on shore.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It does” Maeglin insisted, pulling himself up with a frown.

The stranger smiled thinly. “Then I might ask who you are.” He put up a hand - which Maeglin saw was swathed in bloodied, filthy rags, neatly tied - to silence Maeglin’s protest. “But I will not. For I know already.”

Maeglin’s stomach twisted. “H - how?”

“I recognised your face. You look… very like someone I once knew.”

Maeglin’s eyes widened. “Did you know my mother?” He frowned. “My… father?”

“I did know you mother, as a matter of fact. But I did not mean her.”

Maeglin felt himself blushing, of all things, his face heating with humiliation in the light of the flames. He touched his scarred skin, tracing the lines of his face. “No, I suppose I do not resemble her too much, anymore.”  _Nor do I deserve to_ , he added to himself.

He got the impression that the stranger knew exactly what he was thinking.

“I did not mean your mother.”

“Who, then?” Maeglin’s features twisted in bitterness. “Who has a face like I do?”

“Few enough, now, indeed. But there were once some others who survived and escaped the dungeons of Angband with their minds and bodies intact, more or less. Or were saved from it.”

“You think I deserved to be saved?”

The stranger scrutinised him hard in the firelight. “I did not say so.”

“But you did save me.”

A shrug, an incongruously elegant, fluid motion. “So I did.”

“Why?”

The stranger laughed, an oddly musical, beautiful sound at first, though it ended on a harsh bark of pain. “Do I need a reason? If you think it would have been better had I done else, I can easily throw you back in the sea if you ask it of me.”

“I am…” Maeglin hesitated, frowning. “I am accursed.”

Another cough of laughter, more pained this time, and the stranger laced his bandaged fingers together, twisting them before him. “Do you  _want_  to die?”

Maeglin considered this. “Sometimes, maybe. No.”

They fell into silence for a little while, before the other spoke. “If you’re expecting me to offer advice, you should know that that is not for me to do.”

“Why?”

“I am here merely to watch the world fade, and to tell of it after. That is all I have left, these days.” Again, he cradled his bandaged hands, looking away from Maeglin.

“What does that mean?”

“It means” the stranger looked up at him once more, with hooded eyes that glinted in the firelight, “that it’s not just you. We are all damned here.”

Maeglin blinked, a sudden suspicion rising in him. “Are you called - ”

“I don’t have a name, anymore” interrupted the stranger. He gazed up, his eyes catching on the brightest point of light in the sky, the bright star that blazed in the dusty blue sky after the fading of the bloody sunset. He looked away, sharply, face half-hidden from Maeglin, but suffused with bitterness.

Maeglin nodded, slowly.

They spoke no more that night; silence seemed easier. Eventually Maeglin slipped into an uneasy sleep, filled with shreds of dark dreams mixed with troubled waking.

When he woke fully it was light and his companion of the night before had gone; even his footprints faded after a little way, as he crossed over to where the hard-bitten cliffside grasses swayed and whistled in the rising wind. It was a strange sound, far more melancholy than he would have thought possible from the wind in the grasses.

Either that, or what he heard was the sound of distant singing.


End file.
